Wrichard writes: “‘Isn’t two Cabinet posts enough?’Why should it be? In the fascinating world of the political double-cross, there’s only one rule: be the last man standing.”

To fully understand the relationship of Obama and Richardson we perhaps need to attend not merely to the culture of corruption in New Mexico and Chicago but to the deep psychology that is no doubt involved. Perhaps one can glean some insight by referring back to Freud’s cookbook, and in particular the entry for “Binswanger’s Double-Cross Buns” —-

“What did cause the break with Jung? The passing years have given enough occasions, if not the leisure, for analyzing my relations with Jung. One by one I have gone through our differences—in age, in religion, in background, in temperament and ideas. But as much bound us together as separated us. Only by applying the psychoanalytic method, going back over the case history itself, incident by incident, did I come to find the true culprit: it was Ludwig Binswanger’s buns, baked for me, and not for Jung, on that fateful Whitsun weekend in 912 when I came to Switzerland—to Kreuzlingen to see him and not to Kusnacht to see Jung . . . . Could he not have made more buns had he made them smaller? But most important of all, why were only Jung an I estranged after this episode and not Binswanger, too?”

Are not the analogies to Obama and Richardson obvious to anyone willing to plumb these depths?

(I think the quotation is from “Freud’s Cookbook” by James Hillman, p. 119)